UGLY KID JOE
LIVIN' IT UP
(by Caroline Mellon, Hit Parader - 1992 - pp. 60-61)
© all rights reserved

Ugly Kid Joe is waiting on pizza. After battling over culinary questions for the better part of an hour, the Ugly Kids finally decided that they could all stomach pizza...not sandwiches or Indian food or hamburgers, just pizza and nothing else! And now that they've made that decision, they want it now! But until then, they'll bide their time with us. We're tucked into a corner room, away from the hullabaloo of the day's activities, and we've got the undivided attention (at least until the pizza comes) of four-fifths of Ugly Kid Joe. (Very rad bass dude, Cordell Crockett, was detained with a health care crisis.) In what could soon become too close proximity (it depends upon their behavior), we've got inimitable motor mouth Whitfield Crane, band brain Klaus Eichstadt, the ever-witty Dave Fortman and the wildly wacky Mark Davis.

While the guys were still wild with hunger pangs, we got down and deep...

Hit Parader: So guys, you've been on tour with Ozzy, Bon Jovi and Def Leppard in the past year. Your EP, As Ugly As They Wanna Be is platinum, and your album, America's Least Wanted is almost there. Do you feel like rock gods?
Mark Davis: We don't feel any different whatsoever.
Whitfield Crane: We're all sitting here, dressed how we were a year ago; in fact I'm wearing the same shorts I've had for four years. We don't have any money.
Klaus Eichstadt: What we have now is opportunity. We have the opportunityto make money, but what we mainly have is money and backing and support from the label to do whatever we want musically.

HP: Your albums were recorded on a healthy budget. You should be raking in tons of cash. What are you doing with all your money?
Dave Fortman: What money? I haven't seen any money?
WC: All musicians, except if you're Michael Jackson, are the last to see money. It's the most screwed up industry there is.
MD: Recoup.
DF: I hate that word.
MD: You'd think we'd be rich. I've been wanting to make records my whole life. When I worked in a grocery store, I wore a short haired wig so I could play music at night... and now I'm in a "big" band, and I'm still broke. We've seen practically nothing.
KE: It takes like nine months before you see any of the money you make because it goes through all this paperwork. We're lucky though because the money we made from the EP paid for America's Least Wanted. A lot of bands don't get the chance to even make one record. Because of the success of the album and the EP we're pretty much guaranteed to make at least two more albums.
DF: The bill just keeps growing, it's ridiculous how much stuff costs. Videos cost $100,000.
WC: You have to understand that when the record companies go, "Let's go out to dinner, we'll take you to a five star restaurant and you can have whatever you want to eat." Well, later on, you go through the paperwork and you find that they billed that dinner back to us.
DF: Five months later you get this invoice $2,000 for a meal for Ugly Kid Joe.
WC: Dinner's on me!

HP: So when you finally get your money, what are you going to do with it?
DF: If I need a guitar I can go out and get it. That's all I really would spend my money on. In the future I'd like to buy a house and support a family and all that, but right now if I did have money I'd probably save up for a new guitar or amp or something like that.
MD: I'd like to be able to buy a house. It doesn't need to be a mansion or anything, just a house. I haven't had a home in a long time. When I lived in Santa Barbara before we got signed I camped on friends' couches for months. I lived in a motor home for a few months. Then on tour we didn't have any home, and when we did America's Least Wanted we lived in a makeshift apartment in L.A. I'd just love to have a place I can call home. A place where I can throw beer cans around and nobody's going to give a care about it.
WC: Like the tour bus.

HP: Your tour bus? Why, what's you're tour bus like?
MD: Don't answer that question.
WC: Shhh...Klaus is sleeping.
KE: Def Leppard's stage manager came on our bus and laughed at how messy it was. He was laughing so hard.
WC: Turned over ash trays, beer bottles, beer cans, clothes, stinky socks.
MD: There was some fat girl's butt sticking out of the bunk.
DF: Who's responsible for that?
WC: Not me.
DF: Yeah, but his bunk was moving. To pass the time, obviously we do live a little rock and roll. It was really funny, our tour manager doesn't like us drunk and he doesn't want us to drink, so he makes up these rotten stories of how he can't find beer or alcohol on our rider. So yesterday we got ten cases of Corona and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
MD: We had to buy it out of our own pocket, we stopped at a liquor store and bought twelve packs. So now we're poor.
DF: We could barely afford a box of cheeseburgers and some Dunkin' Donuts.
KE: I don't even like jelly donuts.
WC: Hey! Where's our pizza, I want pizza!
DF: It should have been here by now.
MD: I bet our roadies apprehended it, and they're chowing down right now!

And with that; four-fifths of Ugly Kid Joe pile out of the room and roam the haIls in search of their mystical pizza.

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